Big congrats to Farmhouse Culture for winning this year’s Good Food Award in the Pickles category for their smoky-hot-zesty-fabulous Smoked Jalapeño Saurkraut. Santa Cruz-based Farmhouse Culture makes fantastic krauts from organic California produce, and the award is well-earned. Check out a Spooning recipe for a grilled cheddar cheese sandwich made with my top Farmhouse pick, the green apple kraut. If you want to play around with the award-winning Smoked Jalapeño kraut, try it on a turkey and Swiss cheese sandwich, or on a hot dog (mmmm), or as they suggest, use it to to make some dang tangy nachos! Check out the complete list of Good Food Award winners here.

Good Food Winner! – Farmhouse Culture.

In this week’s installment of green-living website Grist‘s “Protein Angst” series: eating squirrels. It’s a subject that we covered way back in 2008 (in an essay by Steve Rinella and a squirrel-cooking tutorial), but it just keeps coming back. The benefits are many, as the Grist piece points out, and drawbacks are few. Among them: you need a gun and a sharpshooter’s eye (or a squirrel-hunting friend), they’re easy to turn tough if you don’t know how to prepare them, and you can’t eat the brains.

Al rodente: Could squirrel meat come back into vogue? | Grist.

Just as I was lamenting the many long months until my next summer-harvest canning spree, my dad’s lime trees start exploding with more fruit that seems reasonable. Yes! Winter canning commences. In SoCal, we get just magnificent displays on our citrus trees, so now’s the time to dive in and start preserving the lemons, limes and grapefruits, however you can. Try your hand at lemon curd–or lime curd, which is essentially lime pie in a jar–or limoncello, which might also be delicious  made with grapefruit? Try it and send me some. Or, go traditional and make enough marmalade to put Paddington on a bender. I made mine with ginger and my dad’s limes, with just enough sugar to set the gel, but it’s still tart as can be. Delicious on a crumpet, but also works well as a glaze for chicken or fish. It’s good to be canning again. Next up: pickled beets!

I don’t have a specific recipe for the marmalade, since I’m partial to the “throw it in a pot and see” school of canning. But here’s what I did: Read on… »